Untethered – A Day without My Cell Phone is Like a Day in Hell

I slept in. That’s my fault, I know, and it threw my whole morning off by 10 minutes. Getting dressed was rushed, I only straightened up the sheets on my bed instead of actually making it, and I wolfed down my breakfast fast enough to get the hiccups. In the end, my rush to recover my 10 minutes led to me skipping off to work and leaving the single most important thing in my world sitting on the kitchen table…

My Cell Phone

My Day Disconnected

7:57 AM – I arrive at work, realizing as I go to set my cellphone to silent, I have left it at home. Nervously, I hurry on, reminding myself that other than make phone calls, I can do everything I need to do through the internet. Thank God for Google Voice, am I right?

8:03 AM – After I receive my first text message of the day, my mother calls me at work to inform me that I left my phone on their kitchen table. I feel bad for her, knowing that by the end of the day, she’ll have heard my texty noise roughly 9234 times.

8:24 AM – I am beginning to grow nervous and anxious as a result of being phone-less.

9:02 AM – Having distracted myself with Twitter until work arrived for me to do.. the shakes have lessened, but I am still sweating profusely and suffering from random spikes to my heart rate.

10:00 AM – While running reports that froze up my computer, I reach for my phone… FUCK! I will have to sit here and nervously twiddle my thumbs for FIVE MINUTES!

WHAT IF THE PRESIDENT NEEDS TO GET AHOLD OF ME! HE’LL HAVE TO CALL ME ON MY WORK NUMBER! LOOKING THAT UP COULD LITERAL WAST SECONDS OF TIME AND COST TAX PAYERS TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS! IT’S A MATTER OF NATIONAL SECURITY!

10:30 AM – Sobbing silently, I just know that I have missed out on a very important, if unlikely phone call today.

12:30 PM – I head out to the bank, knowing that if I went for my phone, I wouldn’t have time to pay my bills.

01:15 PM – Sitting in my car, reluctantly listening to actual radio, realize that radio sucks, and I start to feel so, very, very tired.

02:45 PM – I content myself with the knowledge that for the first time ever, I’ve had an extremely productive day. I reward myself by drinking another cup of chocoffee… then a cup of tea… then I dance a jig.

03:30 PM – Ok, I’m going to become a real adult now. It’s time to file my taxes. It’s not like I have anything distracting me.

04:30 PM – It’s time to leave work, finally. It’s been the longest day ever, and I’m starting to feel so very, very tired. I want to listen to some Simon and Garfunkel. Since my phone (with Pandora) is at home, I instead listen to the Church of Lazlo bitch about children swearing or something.

04:45 PM – MY PHONE! MY PREEEEEECIIIIIIOOOOOOOUS!

05:00 PM – I am actively amazed at how much battery I have left on my phone. It never holds out that long when I take it to work.

05:20 PM – Receive an important phone call. Thankfully no one tried to call me ealier.

05:30 PM – Sit down and type up this transcript, the entire time happily watching the little green light on my phone flash, signaling that someone out there in the universe thinks I’m worth mentioning. That’s no small comfort.

Published by M.A. Brotherton

M.A. Brotherton is a writer, blogger, artist, and fat-kid from the suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri. He’s tasted a little bit of everything the Midwest has to offer, ranging from meth-tweaking rednecks in massive underground cave complexes to those legendary amber waves of grain. When he’s not writing, he spends most of his time screwing around on the internet.

14 thoughts on “Untethered – A Day without My Cell Phone is Like a Day in Hell”

Obviously, I love you for writing this and feel your pain in so many ways. This happened to me once and now I live in perpetual fear that not only will I forget my phone but I will LOSE it on the way to or from work. And once you lose something on London Underground, that is it. Finito.

i lost my phone once in the DUMBEST of ways. i was out on the street, fighting with my boyfriend (on the phone) and smoking a cigarette (BAD ME *slaps wrist*) and we finished talked and i put my phone down. just down. on the street. in nyc. and then in my haze of anger/sads, i left it there. and didn’t remember it for hours.

since that moment of stupidity, which took me from having a droid to having a FLIP PHONE WITH T9 TEXTING for SIX MONTHS, i have phone insurance too.

I have to use my phone for work, as well. If I leave it at home, that’s roughly 2/3 of my client base that will all decide to call me on the same day. It’s amazing how glued to my phone I am on any given day, at any hour. It’s the first thing that I pick up (my phone is my alarm clock) and the last thing I look at at night (I read on my nook or Kindle apps.) I also have our home phone forwarded to my cell. Our home phone handsets crapped out and it seemed silly to go out and buy new ones. I can be out driving, and suddenly need directions or want to look up the words to a song on the radio. This is how the world will end. They will take away our smartphones and we will degenerate into baseless animals.

I’ve got to admit, I use my phone more for personal things, but almost all of my bloggy things are done via phone. I use it as a scanner (by taking pictures of my doodles), to compose posts, and manage my buffer app from it.

January 20, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Tracy Mangoldsays:

*insert loud chuckling. And then you have me. I have a lil ole tracfone that I only turn on when I get in the car to head up north and when I get back in the car to head back home. Then it goes off until I go back up north. Half the time I forget to charge it. I use my Touch for music in the car but sometimes I forget that too. I won’t say I’m not addicted to anything because I do so love my macbook and my iPad. But if I forget them, I’m not really missing them. I hate cell phones though. I don’t really like phone calls so when I get away from the phone. I’m as thrilled as a cat with pile of mice.
I loved this post though. Your humor shines through and just makes my day. You take the ordinary and blow it up to monster size and tell it in such a fantastic manner that. Thanks for making me laugh first thing this morning when I got up. I’m just glad I wasn’t sipping my coffee at the time. That could have been problematic…especially for my computer. 🙂